Feed-back regarding poker softwares

[all_mine]

hi,

I pretend that PT3 has a lot of development issues. A lot of people is tired about this product. By working in software development in the past, I am very disappointed by several things in the code of PT3.

* First, there are no "exception catches". When there is an unknow error, it is not catched by the program, and it produces unattended errors.
For example, when you import a file that is buggy, your entire database is crashed, and you must purge it. This is not acceptable on a development point of view.
Another example: all crashes (with a message coming from Windows) come from errors that have not been predicted in the development process. In high level languages, you should have some : "try { code } catch { error }". But not in PT3! This leads to unpredictable results.

* Second, when you see some SQL requests (by sniffing over the network for example), it is incredible. You see that some sql requests are very very long, and probably very very unefficient and difficult to debug.

* There are "regressions" (don't know if it is the english word). Beta 13 for instance, you must push "stop import" and push again "start import" if you launch a new table. This bug does not exist in the Beta 12. Regressions should not occur when the developement process is efficient and when the code is clear.

BUT:

I must admit that the persons involved in PT3 are very patient with users (like me), and it is probable that they work a lot too. Furthermore, other Poker programs have issues as well (PokerOffice, developped in Java, is for example very very slow). So, poker players have not a lot of choice: waiting a best product (PT3 or other), and use several programs (Holdem Manager,
PT3, PT2, PokerOffice, Tournament Manager, and a few other ones that are being developed).

The most important issue is that these software are not well developed. Their cost is not too high, of course. But I think that many poker players are ready to pay 400$ for a software that is developed by PROFESSIONALS. A software that have all functionalities of all other software, without any bugs.

Maybe the time is come in the poker world: a professional software associated with a professional service.

Regards.

A poker player.

[Josh]

Exception handling in a C++ multi-threaded Windows application using a third party GUI framework is a little bit different than exception handling in Java/C#/<insert interpreted language here> or a single threaded console app. For one thing, simply adding try {} catch(...){} isn't enough. Some exceptions are directly handled by the operating system resulting in a crash before another line of my code can be executed. Also, multi-threading causes a lot of problems that can't simply be caught with try/catch, and these problems happen randomly and are nearly impossible to debug. Most developers can't develop multi-threaded applications (in a non-hand holding language) because of this. I have years of experience writing these kinds of applications and issues still sneak in (it's extremely difficult to visualize how a threaded application is running).

Our SQL statements aren't optimized because of the *EXTREME* flexibility of our custom stats and reports. You can't have incredible customization and incredibly optimizations at the same time. That being said, optimizations really haven't even been looked at yet, so who knows what we'll optimize in the future.

New bugs occur when major changes are made. Obviously, one of the changes that fixed one bug caused another bug. I personally consider the current bug (resetting to get new tables recognized) more acceptable for the time being than the previous bugs (Hud crashing PT3, or worse, the whole computer). I admitted in the Beta 13 thread that there were still some issues that weren't resolved, but it was more important to get a version that would work out than to wait until all the bugs were ironed out.

As for needing a "professional software" ... the market for this kind of software isn't large enough to warrant a "professional" software company to enter it. They simply would not be able to recoup their development/operating expenses.

[midas]

Maybe the time is come in the poker world: a professional software associated with a professional service.

I say, go for it. Sounds like you know the way it should be done. Shouldn't take you more than a few hours.

[tarix]

Exception handling in a C++ multi-threaded Windows application using a third party GUI framework is a little bit different than exception handling in Java/C#/<insert interpreted language here> or a single threaded console app.

Any other choice of language would have been a seriously bad decision too. I laugh at the other products written in their little script languages. (I'm actually a pretty big fan of C# too! It's just a bad idea for a HUD/stat program.)

Personally I'm hoping you throw in a nice COM plugin system.